However, a long-awaited response to a Freedom of Information request that the Remote Warfare Programme submitted to the Ministry of Defence earlier this year has revealed that the government does not actually have working definitions of combat or non-combat. This suggests that the decision on whether a mission is combat or non-combat is left in the hands of political decision-makers who may have an incentive to avoid the enhanced scrutiny and approval that a combat designation would bring, even if it means wrongly defining the mission at hand.
In the UK, Parliament has increasingly secured the right to a vote on the deployment of British troops on combat missions through the War Powers Convention (WPC). This was established when Tony Blair invited the House of Commons to vote on British military intervention in Iraq, and it was strengthened in 2013, when David Cameron respected parliaments’ rejection of a deployment to Syria. [...]
While the UK is not unique in its lack of a definition – NATO, the EU, and allies such as Denmark all fail to define the term – the political repercussions of designating missions as combat or non-combat are hugely significant in the British system as described above, and make the designation particularly relevant for the UK.
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